Anonymous

Last month, I blogged about a purported hoax on British daily newspaper the Guardian by serial media prankster Godfrey Elfwick.

In November, the paper had publishedan anonymous opinion piece about how its left-wing author was nearly turned into a racist after being exposed to right-wing views online.

Shortly after the article was published, Elfwick – who had previously duped the BBC World Service into allowing him to denounce Star Wars as “racist and homophobic” during a live radio broadcast – claimed authorship of the article.

Perhaps owing to his success at hoodwinking the BBC, many on Twitter – including award-winning US writer and leading New Atheist Sam Harris, whose views on Islam are cited in the article as having helped lead the author to nearly becoming a racist – seemed to accept Elfwick’s claim of authorship at face value.

This led to a high-profile Twitter spat between Harris and eminent US journalist Glenn Greenwald, who accused Harris of engaging in “hatermongering against Muslims.”

Harris later used Elfwick’s unsubstantiated claims to demand an apology from Greenwald.

When I asked Guardian Readers’ Editor Paul Chadwick about Elfwick’s claims, he insisted his paper was “confident about the authorship of the article,” and that he saw “no point encouraging trolls by paying them attention.”

In a follow-up e-mail, I asked Chadwick about his paper’s vetting procedures for anonymous contributors, stating my concern that “without being able to provide demonstrable evidence that an article is genuine, you open the doors to false claims of authorship.”